Seamus Heaney - The Walk - Poetry Analysis

The Walk Two sonnets about love: the first photo-shot focuses on parental devotion within a pastoral landscape; the second ‘longshot’ contemplates Heaney’s married relationship that has lasted more than three decades. The first ‘photo’ has been fully processed, the second is a black and white negative, still a ‘work in progress’, as it were. Fifty years on walks with his mother and father have not lost their alluring sheen: Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her/ And everywhere they took me. On those occasions Nature was hazy and enchanted: Cobbles were riverbed, the Sunday air/ A high stream-roof that moved in silence. He paints the flora of his rural Ulster neighbourhood in its summer prime, from the grandest free-standing shrub to the humblest hedgerow straggler: Rhododendrons in full bloom, foxgloves/And hemlock, robin-run-the-hedge; his mind’s eye still detects the feathered texture of invasive deckled ivy and discerns the light […read more….]